


Familiarity

by octopedingenue



Category: Naruto
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-15
Updated: 2014-01-15
Packaged: 2018-01-08 21:27:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1137572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/octopedingenue/pseuds/octopedingenue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Temari does not like this strange city.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Familiarity

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers up to and including manga chapter 236.
> 
> This is my first _Naruto_ story, the first fanfiction based on anime/manga I've actually completed, and the first fanfiction I've written at all since July. Go me.

Sasuke's defection is Konoha's greatest scandal in many years, and Temari does not like being connected to it, in however favorable a light. It has nothing to do with her. Sasuke had been good-looking and a good fighter, but she'd barely known him. She had nothing to do with it, but the taint of scandal follows her regardless, and she does not like it. She does not like being here, among these strange buildings and these strange people who, whether her enemies or allies, still watch her carefully as she stalks down their streets. It makes her dimly uneasy to realize that the only faces she can recognize, she can find all together in one building beneath the unfamiliar trees.

The hospital is not the largest building Temari has seen in Konoha, but of late it is the most busy.

She does not like it here, likes it least of all. There should be nothing for her here. The noxious odors of disease and disinfectant permeate the hospital halls into its stone. Her stomach rolls as she fights back nausea unbecoming a shinobi, and she is privately thankful that the hospital cafeteria food is too awful to even attempt. Temari does not like to come here, but she does, reluctantly and inevitably, for the last bastion of the familiar available to her: a spot on a bench in the hospital waiting area, three feet away from the sprawled Shikamaru, who has not moved since she saw him last.

He does not move or even open his eyes to acknowledge her presence as she flings herself again onto the bench beside him. Temari swings her legs up onto the bench, grazing Shikamaru in the face with her feet as she does. For all that Shikamaru reacts, he could be a stone and she a leaf skittering by. They sit like this, in silence. The only sign that Shikamaru is still alive is the barely discernible rise and fall of his torso beneath his chuunin vest. Temari lets the edge of her fan dangle almost to the floor and swings it up again, then lets it slide back down. She makes a game of it, and tires of it quickly.

Temari's stomach is tight with tired anger, by now old and familiar to her. She is pathetic for choosing to forego her rightful place of solitude, separate and above, in favor of this stilted, patchy attempt at an acquaintance in which she who speaks first loses.

She says, "What do we do now?"

Nothing should change. Shikamaru does not indicate that he has heard she has spoken. The rhythm of his ribcage's rise and fall is even and unhurried. Still, for the first time in the short time she has known him, Temari sees in Shikamaru's stillness something less than the solid comfort of perfect inactive contentment. It is the tiniest of cracks, revealing only through the twitch of an eyebrow or an exhalation turned half into a sigh that he would rather be anywhere but here, in front of the row of rooms holding his subordinates. His companions. His friends, limp and bleeding.

"We wait," Shikamaru says, his voice indifferent and even.

Temari leans her head against the wall and watches him to find the exact moment that the crack seals again and he is once more quiet, immutable. She lets the edges of her fan brush the floor, sending tiny swirls of dust into the air. She does not envy Sasuke his inevitable return, when the faces of his friends will turn to watch him as though he is a stranger, and Shikamaru will meet him with calm eyes and will kill him without pausing for breath.


End file.
